Stand independent above all other creatures beneath the celestial world

Parental influences have also been diluted by the way in which most current members of the Church earn a living. In times past, one of the great influences that unified families was the experience of struggling together in pursuit of a common goal—such as taming the wilderness or earning a living. The family was an organized and conducted unit of economic production. Today, most families are units of economic consumption, which do not require a high degree of family organization and cooperation.

Pres. Dallin Oaks, Oct. 2025

I wonder if the Saints, myself included, are taking this seriously enough. What would taking this more seriously look like?

Lately, I have felt a push to stand more independently, to have my own income stream. I have had an idea for a business in my mind for years, but now I feel a renewed push to make it happen. I have made more progress on this in the last few months, than I have any other time I worked on this idea.

We all know, there is no strict line separating the Temporal from the Spiritual. (D&C 29:34-35) Business can be just as spiritual as working in our garden. Or as spiritual as Adam and Even working in their Garden.

Self-Reliance is as much a Spiritual principle with spiritual blessings, as it is a Temporal economic one. What would it take to make your family a “unit of economic production”? It does not have to start big. For instance, Pres Oaks talks about having a family garden.

There are two reasons for us to focus on Self-Reliance and to take it more seriously than we have been.

First, because the Prophet and Scriptures have spoken about it. For example:

That through my providence, notwithstanding the tribulation which shall descend upon you, that the church may stand independent above all other creatures beneath the celestial world; D&C 78:14

There are other verses we could quote as well. But there are spiritual aspects to this that are significant. They are blessings we will need.

Second, also because the impact of AI. AI has not yet had a huge effect on jobs, but it will. As I have argued many times, Isaiah 19 records something just like this – mass unemployment and people mourning because of it. The economy will be turned upside down. I think it is almost certain that this disruption will be on a scale far greater than the Great Depression. Much intellectual labor will become like the forklift in a warehouse – useful, important and powerful but also just a common, everyday piece of equipment. It becomes a tool like any other.

A LOT of people will lose their jobs in the upheaval. But, the converse is also true. A LOT of people are going to get rich. Some will get crazy rich. The same tech that enables a CEO to run a company without a workforce, or a minimal one, enables you just as well.

Read that again and burn it into your mind.  The same tech, be that AI, Robotics or whatever else, that enables companies to not need you, also enables you to not need them. And frankly, I think you would handle the money better than they would. The same reason they could get rid of employees, enables you to manage a virtual workforce as well.

Of course, this does not eliminate the need for capital, judgement, customers, reputation or hard work and all the minutia of running a small business. But what it does do is vastly and radically reduce the amount of labor and specialized expertise needed to build something useful. This is more easily doable at this exact moment in history, than at any other time. In my opinion, 2026-2027 may be the peak time to act, the best time to start. The productive power available to an individual relative to the possibilities is rapidly increasing.

Is AI ready to do everything yet, or replace everyone this week? No, certainly not. But one does not stand on the tracks looking at an approaching train, just because it hasn’t hit you yet.

I think it would startle you just how good AI is getting. I say this, because it even startles people who have been in it a long time. It just solved one of the greatest problems in mathematics. (Allegedly)  Ignore the other drama around it, for the moment. It just solved a puzzle that has perplexed the best mathematicians for over a hundred years. There have been other mathematical problems solved as well. If it can do this, it can help you solve problems as well. The problems you can solve are only limited by your initiative, imagination and the Spirit of the Lord. Not to negate the importance of things like capital, but the crucial lever is faith as both a spiritual and temporal principle of power, and revelation. God can open the way, but only if we act.

I think it is time for the Saints to stand more independently, economically. I am not speaking this by authority, but only by the feeling in my heart, and what my own eyes can see. I feel are approaching a hinge point in history. Tremendous problems, and extreme persecution, but also extreme potential to grow both spiritually, and materially. And we are going to need both. The Lord will save his people, but we need to act in faith.

I would encourage all of you, to earnestly consider, and to pray you and your families, whether you should be building an income stream, productive skill, family enterprise, or other form of economic independence outside your primary employment. I sincerely suspect, that for many the answer is yes.

For two centuries, industrialization and economies of scale have steadily pulled production out of the household and into factories, corporations, and offices. Husbands, wives, and children increasingly became participants in separate economic systems rather than members of a common productive one.

AI, robotics, distributed manufacturing, online markets, and cheap automation may now be pushing in the opposite direction. For the first time in generations, a household may be able to command tools, expertise, productive capacity, and access to markets that previously required an entire company.

That does not mean we should recreate the farm economy of the nineteenth century. It may mean something much more interesting: recovering the family as a productive unit, but at a technological level our ancestors could scarcely have imagined.

President Oaks pointed to what was lost when the family ceased to be a unit of economic production. Perhaps one of the opportunities of our moment is to recover and restore what was lost.

So I would ask the question seriously: What could your family build together?

Perhaps it is a business. Perhaps it is a garden, a trade, an investment, a cottage industry, intellectual property, a family enterprise, or something we have not yet learned to imagine.

The point is not merely to make more money. It is to become more capable, more productive, more united, and more independent—to become a family that can act rather than merely consume.

We now have tools that make that possibility unusually real. I think we should use them.